IIS 7.0 keynote @ CodeMash

Having minimal exposure to IIS (only thru local development using Vista) I was anxious to dive under the covers. Scott Hanselman was the presenter, and I must adit, he had me (and most the audience) laughing out loud thru the first 10 minutes of his speech – nothing to do with IIS whatsoever, but a very microsoft-esq, self-serving, comical lead-in.

Once we got into the presentation, interestingly he choose to showcase .php ontop of IIS. He opened a pre-canned php picture application and continued to tweak application settings thru IIS/.net without having to modify a line of php code! pretty cool stuff, including forms-based authentication and lots of http modules, which I found very cool.

Scott closed with some technical difficulties in his demo, highlighting somewhat complex caching, but he handled it well. His intent seemed geared toward non-microsoft folks considering IIS as a legitimate option (at least on par, if not ahead of apache). The demo and IIS did look impressive. I’m now compelled to dive deeper with http modules.